On Sunday 21 September 2008 06:23:54 pm Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

Well having spent a week on Solaris 10.. I can understand why. Most of the tools I am used to getting in a base install of CentOS are not there.. and I will be spending most of this week getting various tools installed so that the programmers do not need to have a crazy chain of if/else logic to deal with OS of the week.

If that's your only complaint then download the latest version of Nevada. Build 98 has a lot of the software you miss in Sol10. Not quite on OpenSolaris level but its a big step up anyway.

Oh, and make sure /usr/sfw is actually in your path...

Linux/Sparc is fragile at best. Even Ubuntu/Sparc on a T2000 (a Sun certified configuration) isn't nearly as stable as Solaris on the same HW.

Peter.

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

Hmmm that might be my problem. I had not looked at what additional paths were there. The boxes I am supposed to support are 2.7,2.8,2.9 and 2.10 so I am going to have to figure out a way to 'unify' them as much as possible without breaking the core application's needs.

Solaris 7 (2.7, sunos 5.7) is way past end of service life, and 8 is nearly there. 9 is nearing the end. it doesn't make any sense to support anything older than Solaris 9 and 10 for a new piece of software unless you're going after some really krufty old markets.

its quite easy to write software and use a build tool chain that supports both solaris and linux, just constrain your developers to a POSIX base level of tools and don't let them snap at every flashy oddball new tool just because you can. write your shell scripts to bourne shell rather than bash and they should work on both. use perl for most other scripting that sh isn't suitable for. Sun provides GCC with solaris 10 at least, in /usr/sfw/bin, however the Sun Studio C++ compiler, available free (installs to /opt/SUNWspro/bin) is a better compiler for complex C++ projects.

also, a bunch of the GPL tools Linux developers may rely on are on the Solaris 10 Companion CD, these install to /opt/sfw

if you need a robust apache+php+mysql environment on Solaris 10, use the "Coolstack" package http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack/ (they also have a newer/better perl5, python, tomcat, and various other OSS stuffs).

Tom G. Christensen wrote:

John R Pierce wrote:

...

Solaris 7 (2.7, sunos 5.7) is way past end of service life, and 8 is nearly there. 9 is nearing the end.

Let's stick to the facts: http://www.sun.com/service/eosl/solaris/solaris_vintage_eol_5.2005.xml

Solaris 7 reached its EOSL just last month. Solaris 8 won't reach it for another 3½ years!

Ok, I jumped the gun a bit, and should have double checked my facts.

However, for all practical purposes, the EOL Phase 1 dates are the ones to go by as no patches are rreleased after that. 7 was EOL Phase 1 in 2005, and 8 reaches that in March 09.

Solaris 9 hasn't even stopped shipping yet so it's not "nearing the end" in any way.

I suspect this will be pretty soon now, however, and EOL phase 1 is 2 years later.